Sidney Blumenthal is right back where he wants to be: in the middle of another partisan blood feud with the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy he’s been fighting since the 1990s.

Hillary Clinton’s wartime, peacetime — anytime — confidant has been thrust again into the public eye by disclosures that he had shoveled questionable second-hand intelligence on Libya in 2012 to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the form of reports she forwarded to her skeptical Foggy Bottom aides.

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The revelations, contained in 850 pages of emails grudgingly released by Clinton, are likely to earn Blumenthal an appearance before Rep. Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee – but they haven’t weakened the bond between the former New Yorker writer and the Clintons, according to a half-dozen people who know both parties. In the words of one longtime Clinton ally, Blumenthal’s involvement in the email mess “has if anything strengthened his position” by underscoring his loyalty and willingness to share inside dope, however flawed — always coin of the realm for the information-hungry Clintons.

Blumenthal’s knack for passing along intriguing tidbits and strategic advice has long given him a position of influence, if not direct operational power, inside Clinton’s inner circle of friends. His now-central role in the Benghazi fight comes as no surprise to allies who have watched with fascination, and not a little alarm, as he’s outlasted a musical-chairs cast of professional Clinton advisers over the past 20 years.

Clinton was unapologetic about her relationship with Blumenthal when asked about the emails on Tuesday during a campaign stop in Iowa. “I have many, many old friends, and I always think that it’s important when you get into politics to have friends you had before you were in politics, and to understand what’s on their minds,” she said. “He’s been a friend of mine for a long time.”

People close to Blumenthal say he’s lawyering up, unbowed and eager to fight back. And he’s confident the Clintons will have his back — as part of an informal loyalty pact that extends back to the early 1990s when he defended them in print, often to the dismay of his own editors.

In addition to being a friend, Blumenthal is also on the extended payroll of Clinton Inc., until recently drawing a salary as a strategic adviser to the Clinton family foundation and another from Democratic-aligned advocacy groups run by a powerful Clinton ally.

Blumenthal is no longer in the inner circle of full-time Clinton operatives populated by the likes of Huma Abedin, John Podesta and the increasingly involved Chelsea Clinton. He consults with Bill and Hillary Clinton less frequently than he did during the 2008 campaign, when he forged a powerful alliance with Clinton pollster Mark Penn, people close to her tell POLITICO. And campaign officials don’t consider him to be as influential as other key intimates outside the official chain of command, such as superlawyer Cheryl Mills or Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

But Blumenthal has been plenty active since Clinton declared her candidacy in March, sharing his insights with the Clintons on the 2016 Republican field and quietly offering opinions on how to battle conservative groups to a select group of friends, according to Democratic operatives familiar with his activities.

And Blumenthal still enjoys unmediated access to the former first couple, to the irritation of the candidate’s senior staff, especially campaign chairman John Podesta, who chafed at Blumenthal’s back-channel access to the first family when he served as chief of staff — and Blumenthal’s boss — in the Clinton White House.

When POLITICO reached out for comment, Blumenthal responded by saying he was entirely consumed with finishing the first installment of a four-volume political biography of Abraham Lincoln. “I have cultivated patience, and made no attempt at a retort,” Blumenthal emailed — Lincoln’s statement to critics following his 1858 defeat in the Illinois Senate race to Stephen Douglas.

He has, indeed, thrown himself into book research: When a reporter approached him at a pre-White House Correspondents’ Dinner event last month, Blumenthal responded by saying he would be happy to chat — so long as the conversation was confined to the topic of Honest Abe. Then followed a cheerful, erudite and achingly detailed analysis of the political motivations underlying Lincoln’s 1847 speech opposing the Mexican war.

Blumenthal broke his silence on the Benghazi emails late Thursday, issuing a statement through his attorney saying he intended to fully cooperate with congressional investigators and emphasizing the informal nature of his consultations with Clinton. “From time to time, as a private citizen and friend, I provided Secretary Clinton with material on a variety of topics that I thought she might find interesting or helpful,” he wrote. “The reports I sent her came from sources I considered reliable. I have informed the House Select Committee on Benghazi that I will cooperate with its inquiry and look forward to answering the Committee’s questions.”

The Benghazi email trove is probably just a hint of what’s out there. Over the years, Blumenthal has corresponded more or less constantly with the Clintons, but especially Hillary, on a wide range of topics — not for nothing did he earn the nickname “Grassy Knoll” for spinning dark conspiracy theories during his tenure in the White House during the Lewinsky scandal. Blumenthal’s noir, wheels-within-wheels worldview meshed with the first lady’s less-than-sunny view of the press and Republicans.

In his 2003 chronicle of 1990s life in the White House, “The Clinton Wars,” Blumenthal describes feeding Hillary Clinton’s appetite for intelligence on her enemies as an operational — and emotional — necessity, a psychic security blanket that gave her a sense she could survive whatever Republicans threw her way. “Having knowledge restored a sense of normality, even amid the storm,” he wrote. “We could see the lines of influence underlying the scandal — the cause and effect, intent and action — and they were political and familiar.”

Blumenthal’s greatest coup — and the one that cemented his standing as a Clinton loyalist — was the secret recruitment of David Brock, a conservative investigative reporter who had done more damage than any other anti-Clinton journalist, as a double agent of sorts in the late 1990s. In 1997, Blumenthal reached out to Brock through a mutual friend and to his surprise, Brock expressed his disgust with the machinations of the right-wing press and the rich conservatives who funded his anti-Clinton work.

The two stuck a friendship. Eventually, Brock flipped sides, developed his own relationship with the Clintons and built a powerful network of Democrat-allied organizations that have made him a major player in party politics. Blumenthal and Brock remain close, and Blumenthal has worked for the Brock-founded Media Matters for America and his super PAC, American Bridge.

One job he couldn’t get: an appointment as a formal staff adviser to Clinton at the State Department. Her attempt to bring him on board in 2009 was vehemently opposed by President Barack Obama’s team, led by then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and press secretary Robert Gibbs, over Blumenthal’s role in pushing unflattering stories about Obama’s drug use and personal life to the media.

Yet, as the Benghazi emails show, Blumenthal and Clinton managed to work together anyway, in typical over-the-transom fashion. One could hear the you-can’t-stop-me in Clinton’s voice Tuesday when she defended the correspondence: “He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances, and I say that that’s just part of the give and take.”

The first tranche of emails, revealed Thursday by The New York Times, shows the danger of this sort of informal arrangement: Blumenthal sent then-Secretary Clinton a memo a day after the Benghazi attack claiming that the murderous mob was part of a wave of protests against a YouTube video that had prompted an attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Cairo. Clinton forwarded the email to Jake Sullivan, a top foreign policy adviser, requesting “More info.”

But the emails also show that Republicans’ hoped-for smoking gun is, at least so far, nowhere to be found: Sullivan responded politely but noncommittally to most of the Blumenthal emails and forwarded the information, at Clinton’s request, to the appropriate State Department specialists. There they seem to have died.

Despite the fact that Clinton doesn’t name Blumenthal as her source in the emails, two former administration officials told POLITICO that Sullivan, who now serves as the Clinton campaign’s policy czar, knew very well that he was her source and that he resented Blumenthal’s freelancing.

“Jake was too nice to tell the secretary what he really thought,” said one former senior national security official. “But he was really pissed off that Sid was wasting everybody’s time.”

Still, Sullivan is discovering what other Clinton hirelings have known for years: Bill and Hillary think Sid’s time, advice and dish are yet valuable.